


In the Elephant Field

by sandandsalt



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M, ghost au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 03:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandandsalt/pseuds/sandandsalt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she sees him, there is a spell she says, thrice, like schoolgirls used to when looking into dark mirrors, You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Elephant Field

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cyanocorax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanocorax/gifts).



> For Crystal, one of the most lovely human beings to ever walk this earth. Happy (very belated) birthday! Sorry this isn't anywhere near as wonderful as you. Titles lifted from Jean Valentine's 'Ghost Elephants'. Accompanies [this](http://sallygilmartins.tumblr.com/post/42974814593/au-meme-the-hour-randall-brown-is-a), in a way.

**i. a cargo of summer leaves**

When she sees him, there is a spell she says, thrice, like schoolgirls used to when looking into dark mirrors (faces splinters of rosy bones in the hasty candlelight), _You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead._ In school, their matching socks ebbed to unmatching lengths (hers, one too high, one much too low, identifiers) and the choke of smoke around their necks (all the sweeter for being inhaled wrong, for passing through fingers that were clumsy in the illicit nature of the act, clumsy and, in some ways, to be caught), they used to creep through hallways searching out old school ghosts. Sisters that died of being too dreadfully boring, woman doomed to scream in mirrors. Lix had raced down the hallways, far ahead of the flames and the lights, felt her way through the stone walls. She had felt then, what she would grow to feel again much later: that she wouldn’t be, couldn’t be caught.

But those were girls’ games. Harmless rebellions done when the body was humming from lack of sleep, the mind too alert, so if an errant nun was seen, floating high above their heads with a milk-pale face and a ghastly cord tight around her neck, it had been a trick of the light and their youth and nothing more. When they said those words, like fairy tale charms, in the mirror, the faces would always disappear. (And only reveal her own – high bones, defiant tilt of the chin, some mess of black hair that faded into the darkness of the room, made her look just as ghastly as the translucent monsters from her mind – staring back at her with eyes that refused to spell out fear.)

 _You’re dead,_ she says stubbornly, _you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead._

 

 

  
When they met that first time, when she could still hold his wrists, because his wrists could still be caught (he was like an insect, always, each nerve a green grasshopper’s coiled spring leg, his fingers translucent dragonfly wings that were there, there, _there_ and then not there at all), Lix still wore her socks like that, high and low. He pointed that out to her one heavy Madrid night, fingers descending down her leg. He had buzzed, he had always buzzed, as if none of his atoms were ever in place, as if you could feel the constant rotation of his elections. As if body was afraid that if it stopped moving, it would stop moving forever.

(She hates thinking of him like that. She hates thinking of him like a bug too. Bugs live lives too short. Twenty-four hours. A blink of an eye.)

(Gone.)  
  
  


 

 

But there he is again. He announces his presence in small ways first. The camera lens is capped. The paperclips are in neat little rows. It makes her scowl. It makes her throat constrict around her heart and makes her blood tremble against her skin and she stands by the board, pulling out the symmetry from the thumbtacks. He’s done this before. She hates him for it.

”You’re not welcome,” is what she says when she first sees him. He looks different again. He always looks so fucking different. Older, now. Like her. The first time he had followed her, he had looked the same as he had in that Spanish street. Holes in his skin. Blood on his tongue. He had followed her in imperfect movements, tethered more to his pain than his longing. She thinks, now, that she liked that incarnate most. That one had never said a word. In France, he had called upon her like he would’ve from in their makeshift offices. Camera around his neck. Faint catches of brown in his hair. His suit always so fucking crisp, no matter what they were doing. No matter how much they ran. This one had talked to her. She had thrust herself above the trenches and this man had pressed his fading palm against her hips. This one had overlayed his hands against her own, steadied her shots. This one had sat opposite her in dark rooms, in crowded bomb shelters, in pure daylight in the middle of the street when she felt her whole body collapsing. That one, with the face of her lover, with the face she had memorized by holding it against her breast, that one had put her together again and again and again.

This one is older. This one is, she assumes, what he would look like if he was here, really here, with her now. His hair is grey. His glasses are bigger, more like hers. He fixes and refixes his tie as though it will never be straight. Lix wonders, looking at him for only half a second and nothing more, if he can even feel it.

Then she thinks, _You’re being stupid, Alexis._ (Alexis, which no one has called her since she stomped through the school grounds. Alexis, which was a scolding name.) _He can’t feel a single bloody thing._

She says none of this to him, of course, leaves him to stand by her window. He must be uncomfortable, because he always was. Always making his home in silence, but uneasy ones. He always had something to say, but never the vocabulary to approach it. She ignores him.

 

 

Bel holds her camera – not noticing the irregularity, the capped lens, the covered eye – while Lix is pouring herself another helping of whiskey. _He_ (because He doesn’t have a name yet and she prays that He never will; to name him – even if it was His name to begin with – is to acknowledge Him, to welcome Him) is there too, standing in the doorway. Bel doesn’t see.

Bel’s hands – lovely hands, bless her – don’t fit around the sides of the camera and Lix knows that those fingers never will. There’s no mud in them, that’s what she means to say, always, in her stories. Bel has never laid down in the dust and filth and felt her heart beat, violent, next to men whose own pulses are slipping. Bel looks through the camera’s eye and, capped, she sees nothing.

Lix reaches out, takes the lens. She slides it along the edge of her desk, knocks a tidy row of paperclips to the ground. (Half a second, she looks at the doorway. _He_ doesn’t cringe.) “Now try, darling,” she musters up amusement.

And then she is tipping the whiskey down her throat while Bel fidgets and hums around the lens, trying to see like her news predecessors used to. This sight is lost on her. “You were born with other gifts,” Lix smiles, takes the camera out of the girl’s hands. “A pretty face and a prettier mind – you have no need for these old toys.” It’s burning her hand to hold it. _He_ pours her another glass when Bel leaves and she would say something (or nothing) to Him, but her fingers are white around the camera’s base and there’s dirt in her veins and it’s numbing and it’s cold and she can’t move.

Looking through a camera, Lix knows, is like being sober.

They all come crawling back to her, skin snow white and throats blood red. (And she screams, she screams her fairy tale spells, but they never leave her.) The peer out from walls with their mud-stained faces and there are bodies, husbands round up to be shot lying on the floor, that soldier whose handsome face she had turned over until it wasn’t handsome anymore, wasn’t even a face. More than just Him, so much more than Him, a whole other war ( _A war,_ she wants to scream at Him, wants to punch Him, wishes she could, _you fucking missed_ ). If she doesn’t drink, they stare at her through portraits, tap on hallway glass. She sees their falling faces, the jut of their bone and the purple of their lips.

They don’t hang over her head like that Sister did, those years ago on the school grounds. They’re caught between walls; they drift up through the floorboards. Heavier spirits, weighted with carnage. They don’t go away when she blinks, when she turns the corner.

And Him, Him in the centre of it all, still and suited and, today, this time, His face so clean, so clean and pure as if nothing had ever happened, as if He had never left. She watches Him through the camera lens, Him standing with His blasted ethereal calm (and His compulsive, violent twitching that not even death robbed him of) while all of them, soldiers and fathers and mothers and little girls (she never looks too long at their faces), crawl out around Him until the room is coated in a spiderweb of their bodies and Lix drops her camera, throws up in the bathroom.

She doesn’t dare look in any of the mirrors.

 

 

He realizes, she supposes, that she is never going to speak to Him, not really. And He must have some sort of unfinished business, because eventually His hands are humming over her desk (she types faster) and He’s holding her camera and ( _Smash it, if you want_ , is what she stops herself from saying) and she knows He must be staring at her through it. How does she look? Can she even be seen through that eye? Lix doesn’t know if it captures life anymore.

 _Sophia_ , is what He says.

She presses nonsense into the keyboard so she can’t hear Him.

 _Sophia, Sophia, Sophia_.

 

  
  


 

He takes to whispering nonsense. Urges her to look into the past, says it hurts and grows if they don’t. ( _You can’t be hurt anymore_ , she feels the words turn thick and stop in her throat.)

He says other things, taps spots on the map. She catches herself, once, handing Him a slip to tape up against the wall. His fingers touch the paper’s curled edge, and she continues the motion, passes her hand just above His shoulder (won’t touch Him, won’t), hangs it up herself.

Later, He straightens it.

 

 

She falls asleep in the office and stirs when the sky is some bloody violet with the beginning of morning, finds Him adjusting her coat around her shoulders. (They used to use their coats as blankets. They used to use less.) She thinks she smiles in that warped light, smiles before she can catch herself. She smiles before she realizes the purple is threading through what should be His skin.

He looks so much like Himself, is she what she thinks. He looks like He used to, waking up in their empty apartment, her body twisted around His (he always slept too straight, in lovely neat lines). She has the thought that this is what it could be (should be) if there was anything opaque in His face. He could wake her up like this. He could keep that hand pressed against her shoulder. She could smile.

She smiles. And then she doesn’t.

And the next night she goes home.

 

 

There are dishes in her sink, but they’re already clean. They’re stacked there because her cabinet collapsed against itself. The boards lie like hollow tombstones on her counter.

The only things that ever need cleaning in her would-be home are the glasses, which collect amber in their dainty crevices. They’re gifts, crystal and pretty, from Great Aunts and Mothers and she forgets to clean them, some nights, out of spite. She hopes they get cracked. She hopes they ruin.

There are papers on her floor and the mattress disappeared from her bed a long time ago, leans against a wall outside the kitchen instead. On the frame, she has stories stacked. Files. Photographs from the war. There’s a package underneath tied with heavy string and R. B. scrawled in the corner and Lix pretends not to feel its presence as she moves through her apartment, reacquainting herself with all the rooms again. Her home is a stranger, half the time.

The bare spaces exist on the sofa, where she usually sleeps, and the desk in front of it, where she sometimes writes. The kitchen collects echoes instead of food.

When she looks outside the window, she sees Him down below, shining through the branches of a crippling tree and she wants to sob, but she slams the window frame down instead.

 

 

She can remember him like that, buttoned up in a suit even though it was always sunny and always hot with sweat and blood and decay. There were no clouds in the sky but the threat of dark, poison ones, ones that coughed and hacked out death, and that only made everyone move quicker, made everything hotter. Him standing below her (their) window and her arms and neck craning out of the frame. She had been able to see the sweat ripping down his throat, tracing out lines to suck and bite.

”Do I have business with you, Mr. Brown?” She remembers calling out.

He had twitched and the twitch had been a smile and the smile had been his joke, because he hadn’t had other words to say. A package of cigarettes had been presented. His camera had swung (tight lines, even the extensions of his body were controlled) around his neck.

”Oh, Randall,” her lips had pursed and they had been wet and raw, “you are a charmer.”

 

 

She thinks she hates her apartment, but, now, she hates her office more.

It’s nighttime and everything comes to her in shadows, so she lights a smoke for want of the sun again. (A small flame, a circle of orange. It’s enough. It was enough in those dark, French nights.) She hates herself for checking the window, but she does. She hates herself for opening it. Smoke unfurls out of her mouth and she thinks her bones have been slicked with whiskey, thinks that’s all that’s left in her veins. Thinks, too, there’s only smoke (smoke and dust and a woman’s screams), no air in her lungs. She thinks, she isn’t so different from Him now. Thinks, she’ll match Him soon enough.

And there He is, shining down below. And He can’t sweat and He can’t feel anymore, but she can see, she thinks, a throat clenching beneath some silver sheet of skin. She can see through Him. She can see into Him.

She leaves the window.

She leaves the window open.

An invitation.

 

 

When she wakes up, head curled into the sofa, she can see her floors.

The dishes are stacked in a fixed cabinet in kitchen.

The mattress is lying, peaceful, on her bed.

And the files that used to be there, sprawling some ancient labyrinth of text through the frame, are all stacked to the side.

The folder, R. B., lies on the very top.

 

**ii. at night I heard you breathing at the window**

 

She feels as though she is constantly waking up. Waking up in the morning and seeing him sitting in a chair, opening and shutting books, pacing through her hallways. Waking up and seeing him over her shoulder, adjusting the papers along the office walls. She speaks aloud, muses over the lace edgings of her stories. Freddie (another old ghost, of sorts) sticks his head in sometimes, gives her a look and she gives him a look back. Randall buzzes in the corner.

Waking up in the night with a horrible emptiness in her gut, one she doesn’t think of, one she never looks for, and Randall watching her from the sofa’s edge. She closes her eyes. She speaks to him properly in the dark because they used to speak in the dark and she could feel him then – and he was alive then.

 

 

”Are you real?”

”Reality is in the hands of our editors, Miss Storm.”

”Fuck you.”

   
  


“I don’t know, Lix. Do you want me to be?”

 

”I don’t know.”

 

 

She comes _home_ again and the word feels less lopsided in her mind as she turns the lock in its key. Randall is slow on the steps behind her, needs to get the rhythm of his pacing right or he can’t go anywhere. (Lix wonders, for a moment, if that’s why he can’t go on to the afterlife or wherever it is he ought to be.) 

She lays out clippings on her desk, tacks a map up against the wall, and hand laced with smoke, she spends the next hours connecting pin to thread, speaking out loud.

”Do you remember the bombs?” She says, remembers it’s a stupid question, doesn’t look at him, does.

Randall is cleaning out one of her glasses, its walls the same colour as his skin. She thinks how her mother would have given them something like that if they had ever got married. (Not that they would have.) (They wouldn’t have.) (She knows they wouldn’t have.) But this is what life could have been like, Lix chokes. A half-cleaned hurricane of a house, an impromptu Dewey Decimalised stack of files. Mostly empty plates, but a cupboard full of wine. And pins tearing scars along maps. And the mattress always on the bed frame, even if the sheets weren’t made. (And another room. And a smaller bed. And no fear of crying.)

Randall looks at her from through the door’s arc and he sees too much.  
  
Maybe he always has.

(That was the story they used to tell. How he hadn’t even held a camera when the BBC took him in, how he had been a wiry Scottish shadow until he had said – more gravel than voice, more whisper than sound – that one of their star journalists ought to hold it different. He had been a nobody until they had put the camera in his hands for the first time and he had taken the clearest shot they had seen. A twitch of his hands, an instinct, and it had all been perfectly centred – perfect shots, he always wanted his shots to be fucking perfect – and the shot that had got him, really got him, it had been a perfect one too –

”Myth,” Randall had said, unzipping her trousers.

”But a damn good one.” He hadn’t argued.)

 

 

”I hate you.”

 

 

The first time she puts her hand through him, it’s a mistake.

They’re climbing the steps to her office and she’s holding too much and searching for her glasses and moving too fast and too much and when she spins around, she falls a bit, and her hand grabs the railing and she passes through his ribs.

They stand in tableau for a long, aching moment, and Lix can feel the sun set through his body, feels her wrist chill to ice.

She says, “Sorry.”

She says, “Fuck.”

Randall vanishes and she keeps her arm hanging, outstretched through the nothingness, through absolutely nothing.

 

 

He comes back to loiter in the doorway that night, more shadow than glow and something about that scares her in a way she thought she couldn’t be, not anymore. They fold their bodies in the chairs by her window and she pours two glasses and drinks them both and he says, “The boy, you ought to keep a tighter leash on them.”

”I’m not their mother.” She speaks too quickly and silence swallows the next beat. They shift, uncomfortable in it. “Anyway, you can’t cage him.”

Another pause.

”He’s much like you in that regard.”

”All the more reason to watch him.” A motion to his heart, to a place where his body no longer hums.

 

 

’Why’d you have to do it? Why the fuck did you do it?”

”Would you have done different?”

”I wouldn’t have died. I wouldn’t have fucking _died_.”

Her voice feels too wet and then too dry and then she laughs, hysterical, “I’m mad aren’t I, Randall? I’m really fucking mad.”

 

 

Spain. They chased each other through alleyways, chased something greater than themselves. He ran faster when he was drunk, slicked his bones with livewire restlessness and they had moved in symmetry, wearing each other’s clothes, because they only had one wardrobe and all of her things were his things and all of his things were hers. There were monsters in every man’s face. There were tears underneath every civilian’s skin. They had been like dogs, she thinks, or bats. Fanged ones. Vampires. Wild and dark and they had pushed their way through the masses, pushed the city into one cobblestoned crowd. They forgot how to tell the flash of a camera from the flash of a gun.

And they had moved like that. Randall had moved like he wouldn’t be shot and Lix had moved like they could never shoot her. (The two were very different things, though only in their minuteness.)

Only one of them had been right.

 

 

It grows dark because it’s always growing dark now and it always is dark. In Spain in grew dark underneath some swollen, orange sun. In France it was always dark. In England, it’s something of a cross. In England, it’s always grey. They arrange their bodies in a jigsaw, she fits herself around him and rests her legs where is body both does and doesn’t occupy any space and he watches her eyelids become thick and heavy and lapse into some other world.

”I’ll look for her,” Lix says before she falls asleep.

”Will that make you happy?”

(And Randall doesn’t know, so he doesn’t respond. He thinks he nods.)

”It’s what’s best for us,” he tries, but Lix doesn’t hear.

 

 

”Don’t question my insights, darling, simply revel in them,” she holds Freddie’s chin between her fingers and, god, skin. She’s almost forgotten the feeling of it.

”I just don’t understand what business our esteemed foreign desk has with a young, mystery girl.” He’s digging. She can see it in his eyes. In the way he leans in, his muscles electric. (So much like Randall, is what she doesn’t say. How could she make him understand? How could she want to make him understand?)

”The universe reveals when the universe wants it to be revealed.”

”And Lix Storm remains an enigma.”

”An old woman needs some secrets, wouldn’t you agree?”

 

 

Randall is cleaning glasses she knows are clean.

”It’s out of our hands now,” she scolds, turns off the lights, shuts the window.

She stands in the kitchen and watches his back and watches through his back and watches the glass balance in the air. She thinks he might clean it until there’s nothing left at all. There’s a nervous lurch in her stomach. She tugs on his hip and her hand slips through.

”Come,” she says, but it’s less of a word and more of a breath.

She leads him slowly through the dark. She remembers drunken, clumsy feet, the lazy lean of a neck to a shoulder. She reminds trying to dance with him. She moves backwards through the narrow hallway and there’s something in his eyes – she doesn’t look away, not tonight – that looks positively alive. She would shudder, she thinks, if he could shudder with her.

She undoes herself like she knows he would, like she’s done ever since he left her. Blouse first. The bottom three buttons. Then the top two. Pulls it over her head in a motion that seems to take forever, that takes a whole insect’s life span. Slides her hands against her sides, over her hip bones, ignores the spectral trails of silver along her stomach. She thinks, they match here, in this darkness. She thinks, you did this to me. She slides her hands along her hips and lets her trousers fall like a shadow below her legs.

He sits on the bed and there’s some light in him in this dark. He sits on her bed, on the mattress he cleaned and propped up with the sheets crumpled in the corners (her doing, not his), and Lix knows this body even though she’s never met it, even though no one else in the world has ever seen it.

She tries to hold him against her.

She thinks about his neck and Spain and thinks she’d like to kiss it, him, anything.

She puts her hands through him. She traces where the bullets fell, pushes through him and expects to feel something hard and cold and silver and solid – something, anything – presses her hand against where a mouth should be and imagines the redness of his tongue.

She arranges her body around him, God she’s always arranging her body around him (around its absence), and holds the shape of emptiness as best as she can.

 

 

She dreams of Spain. The darkness of the room and the way her hands would stop against the bones in his chest. Her lips on his neck. She dreams of them, the double-exposure of their bodies over their sheets. His neck, her thigh, his knee, all of it one solid knot. If they had died, she thought it would have been felt at the same time. If they had been shot, it should’ve gone through both their hearts.

She dreams of Spain. She dreams of herself alone on the streets and no butterflies in any of the trees. She feels a weight in her stomach. She feels a nothingness in her heart. She dreams of a little girl.

She dreams, _Sophia, Sophia, Sophia._

 

**iii. but it was a beheading**

 

”What was she like?”

It feels as though Randall’s speaking through her mouth. She can feel his skin resting above hers, their bodies one on top of each other, the closest thing to touch. Her skin feels like winter. She shivers because she knows, now, he’ll shiver with her. She closes the palms of her hands into fists and pretends she’s holding his.

”Your eyes. My hair. I don’t know. Children all look the same.”

There’s an image in her mind, a wide-eyed little girl, painted only in warm colours and sunlight.

Randall Brown peels himself from her body and she turns and the warmth that surges back through her pulse is of no comfort.

”They all look alive.”

 

 

Freddie leaves the folder on her desk and she spends the first half the morning not looking at it. Randall rocks beside her, but says nothing. At lunch, she has a glass of whiskey and holds it in her hands and it feels solid and it feels warm and cold and it feels like it will sleep through her fingers at any moment.

She feels sick. She feels so sick.

”Do you want me to –“

”Yes.”

Lix bends herself into her chair and stares at the woman in the mirror. Looks away. Closes and opens and closes and opens her hand and tries to catch his.

 

 

Would they have been able to buy her a piano? Would they have even thought of one? Lix holds her camera with white knuckles and tries to play a sonata around its edges. She thinks about looking through the lens. She thinks, _There’s nothing there_. Looks at Randall, the silver of his edges and the bleed of him into the walls when he buzzes, just so. There’s nothing unwelcome, she catches herself thinking.

She remembers seeing little girls tripping through walls. She remembers not being able to hold their hands. (She remembers the last time she let go. She remembers her daughter, his eyes, snapping into place in another country, in another house, in another woman’s arms.) Lix puts her camera down.

 _Sophia_ , she thinks, and wonders what that child sees in the mirror.

 

 

”You shouldn’t have left me alone like that.”

The bar is sparse and the few occupied tables are full of sapling-faced people, weak and thin and maybe that’s why Randall looks so solid here. He doesn’t drink anymore, but his hands play with a coffee cup, left behind. He can’t make his eyes (Sophia’s eyes) meet hers.

”You can’t just do that,” Lix says again.

”You can’t leave whenever you like, now that you’re here. You can’t – you wanted this.” _You did this to me_.

She bends into the empty space beside her, she puts her hand through his knee, tries to kiss (to touch) his neck.

She’s forgetting what it was like before he came back. She’s forgetting that his absence in a room is normal. These are things that should frighten her, she thinks. These are things that always did.

”They make mistakes all the time,” and he says this like it’s his own spell, says it and tries to soothe the tremble of china in his there-not-there hands.

 

 

They’ve always lived paper-trail lives, lurching from one headline to the other. She tells herself (and she tells him, which she has become more accustom to doing, which does as though she always has, which she does as though she never stopped) that this is no different. They live (she lives; he exists) between file folders, between messy paperwork and patchwork images of girls faces. Waiting, waiting. This is no different. This is exactly how it used to be.

 

 

”Will she hate us?” Lix says, pauses -

”Will she hate me?”

”She can’t hate you, of course. You’re not – Girls always hate their mothers anyway, I think. Even just a bit. Mine was horrid. You would have – Monster. Monster. Still likes to send me fancy skirts and shit, hopes I’ll gives this up and – I don’t know. But at least she’s here, I suppose. Mothers are supposed to be there, aren’t they?”

 

 

The next file is lighter and he sits in her chair and she sits on her desk and it sits better in her hands. The sky is blue and not grey and there’s no rain for once. Randall’s tie almost looks straight. She can see the springs in his not-muscles, something tense and waiting under the shine of silver features. He rests his forehead in his hands (does he feel his own weight? is there anything there to feel?) and Lix knows this is a sign to go forward.

Forward then. Enough of the spectral war games, enough of the coiled suspense. She’s lived too long like that. He’s lived too long without it.

Forward, then.

 

 

_Dead._

 

 

And all his energy, all his springs, comes out at once, comes undone at once. She watches him to not look at the file and she watches him to not look at the picture (his eyes, the beginnings of her hair; she would have had his jaw, her lips; she was a beginning; she was so young). He’s moving quickly she thinks, because she can’t see where he ends and the room begins, because she can’t quite pick him apart from the air.

But every motion is slow. Weighed down by a hundred lives, weighed down by just one. _Sophia, Sophia, Sophia_. Her mirror cracks against the floor. He rips out the pins and the tacks and all the little papers and they fall, mottled feathers, like bombs, like smoke, like bullets through her room. (She thinks she’s crying. She thinks she’s forgotten how.)

Lix swallows her tears. Lix swallows her voice. Lix swallows every memory that crawled underneath her skin.

(But she does remember this, she remembers him. She remembers the thunder and the lightning from behind a closed apartment door. She remembers the sound of a mess, but never the chalk outline of it on the ground. He’s moving too slowly. Lix tells herself, _none of this is real_.)

 

 

(Was she ever real? Dark hair, bright eyes. Is he real? She can remember the weight of one of them in her arms, but she no longer remembers which.)

 

 

Randall covers her room in silver-white dust, and all her things are sprayed along the floorboards so that it looks like there was nothing at all. Lix doesn’t know how to move. There are words and mangled headlines, papers sliding from him to her, but none of it connects, but none of it means anything. There’s a photo of a girl’s face on the ground, but the pulse beneath the paper is gone.

It’s gone. It’s gone when she looks into the doorway and she think she’ll see Freddie or Bel or Hector, anyone, and she thinks she’ll have to explain – something, to someone, somehow.

There’s a girl instead. And she floats, just a bit above the ground, on uneasy legs and her eyes are so bright and blue, just barely, like the sky.

She doesn’t see Lix.

A hand outstretched and she feels more than sees Randall’s fit around it.

 _No,_ she says.

_No, no, no, no._

_You don’t get to leave me._

_You don’t get to –_

She’s screamed his name before, but she can’t think to move, can’t remember sound. Lix feels the absence of bone cutting through her skin. She wants to tell them that she feels like them, that she is like them, but the words don’t float through her skin and she doesn’t move, doesn’t remember how.

Randall is holding the girl in his hands and he lifts her up gently and Lix thinks – _this could have been_ – and Lix thinks – _no no no_ –

The girl has such small hands. Bigger than when Lix last touched them, but small still. (And yet they’re the size of the room, too, and all of it is choking.)

_You can’t leave me now._

_You don’t get to leave me now_.

 

 

She goes home; she doesn’t clean up the mess. (She doesn’t know how.)

 

 

(She thinks she’ll find him shuffling up the stairs. She thinks she’ll find him in the kitchen. She opens his damn file and takes out all of his damn photos and she throws them across the room and thinks he’ll come and pick them up.)

 

 

Lix Storm lies in the bed he made and the sheets feel like they slip through her skin. Her mouth is dry. She opens and closes her hand, but feels something, slow and chilled but there, beating underneath it. She shivers and pretends he feels it. She slips her hands along her hips and the ghost-scars burn. She cries until she forgets how and all her tears are caught beneath her skin.

She feels transparent, that’s the word. Less than a person and more than a ghost. She feels transparent, her heart ticking through her skin and her eyes not quite able to shut, twitching, buzzing. Her eyes hum at different times and her body is a tightly wound clock losing its time; her body is five different clocks and they’re all out of time.

She tries to shut her eyes and tries to remember him lying over her skin and she tries to find him, tries to find anything.

Lix Storm folds herself inwards a hundred, a thousand times. She folds herself so inward that all her light is smothered.

She says, _You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead.  
_

 

 

She wakes up. She goes to the bathroom.

Only her face stares back. 


End file.
